You Can’t Run from Air Pollution: The Effect of Fine Particulate Matter on Physical Tasks

A large share of the world’s population is employed in manual labor. This paper estimates the effect of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) on purely physical tasks analyzing half a million amateur track and field competition results, a setting that allows excluding productivity effects through the cog- nitive channel. Exploiting the panel nature of the data and high dimensional fixed effects, I find that a 10 µg/m3 increase in PM 2.5 reduces performance by 1% of a standard deviation. The effect grows with the duration of effort, indicating that occupations requiring low-intensity and sustained effort may be more affected by air pollution than occupations requiring occasional short but intense bursts of energy.